I keep waking up in the middle of the night saying “fuck, goddamnit.” my body is slippery with sweat and the blankets are cold and soggy. I thrash in the sheets and kick as each wrinkle in the blanket touches a nerve and joins the conspiracy. I'm usually still half-dreaming. The dreams mingle with the memory and my hope comes crashing down. Last night the dream was about Miller. For some reason, at the end, I was fighting someone and we were beating each other with books, only my blows would pass right through him and his would drop me to the ground. As I regained lucidity, my mind recalled the institutional experience that had really happened. The hopelessness grew. I started to wonder how it was that that boy in the khaki pants turned into this bearded drunk.

I'm trying to figure out where I stand. My sister, the person who formed me more than any, might be dying from cancer. Her lymph nodes are clean, which is a relief, but from reading Monkey Dancing I now know that it can easily metastasize in the bones. I try not to think about such things, but they attack me in the darkest hours and I wake trembling.
My resentments are overwhelming. My past does not seem to be mine and my present, of course, is shaped by my disengaged past. These thoughts, however, are irrelevant, since kimya dawson told me to have a 40 for breakfast and wallow, and that's what i did.

Kimya Dawson - The beer. mp3

1week of art works

For some reason, the Iraqi Prime Minister's order for the US to abandon their mandatory checkpoints in Baghdad isn't making headlines on BBC or The Washington Post. However, I found it buried on the NY Times website, and there are two pictures on Yahoo! News (1, 2). The lack of coverage is ridiculous! This could be huge! It might let Iraqis see an empowered government that can be relied upon to end the occupation on its own terms. Though maybe this is just Maliki appeasing the Shi'ites, which would mean that the sectarianism and Sunni resentment of the government is really really bad and a solution will be longer in coming. I hope that there are still enough moderate Iraqi's left to figure it all out once the US gets out of the way (hopefully that will be soon. REMEMBER TO VOTE!). Looking at how the residents of Sadr City are reacting to the first day of being able to travel without mandatory searches, I hope the result is the former: